Briefs

The pilot programs ignored privacy safeguards, says a recent Homeland Security report. By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 28, 2007 edition

From late 2004 until mid-2006, a little-known data-mining computer system developed by the US Department of Homeland Security to hunt terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and biological weapons sifted through Americans' personal data with little regard for federal privacy laws.

Now the $42 million cutting-edge system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS's own internal watchdog.

Data mining to help fight the war on terror has become an accepted, even mandated, method to provide timely security information. The DHS operates at least a dozen such programs; intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense employ many others.

But ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) was special. An electronic omnivore conceived in 2003, it was designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources, government documents and researchers say.

Read more.

Also see WP article DHS Ends Criticized Data-Mining Program.